A Less-Than-Masterpiece
by Tripwire Alarm
Summary: A vignette. "It's a long walk back to the TARDIS from the entrance of Bowie Base One, and he takes it slowly. Not so much because of the weight of the spacesuit, but slowly because he's heavy, heavy and full like a storm cloud ready to break, ready for the rush, the flood, the downpour. Heavy because there is nothing he can do. " (Mentions of Doctor/Rose, FYI.)


The distance is further than he remembers.

It's a long walk back to the TARDIS from the entrance of Bowie Base One, and he takes it slowly. Not so much because of the weight of the spacesuit, but slowly because he's heavy, heavy and full like a storm cloud ready to break, ready for the rush, the flood, the downpour.

Heavy because there is nothing he can do.

The feeling is familiar. More and more, there really is nothing, nothing he can ever do. Because anymore, every day is volcano day, and he's a rodent in a wheel, running, thinking he's turning the cogs of time when the cogs of time are just turning him. Turning and rolling, everything on repeat like a syndicated television show. This is how a life looks flattened out like it's a grocery list, item by item, day by day. Everything a line from one tragedy to another, the rerun of the rest of your life.

This is how forever can look. Running and running at zero miles per hour, going nowhere because there is nowhere to go to get away from himself.

(_This is really seeing the future. You just leave us behind. Is that…?_)

Maybe it's been long enough now. It's been long enough since the atrocity, since the Moment, since the Great Key and the ignition switch, a moment in which he couldn't have made any other choice without condemning the whole of the universe and everything in it to an eternity of torment, a power struggle locked in perpetual motion, churning and spitting out everything in its wake in a closed circuit of suffering; a snake that eats its own tail.

Planets, systems, entire galaxy clusters swallowed by the creeping darkness of avarice: the greed of the temporal powers. A power struggle that could not be won with all sides accepting that all things were impermanent and subject to change.

So much and yet so little has happened since. He'd mourned aimlessly, decades where he had ceased to feel anything, everything echoing up from his vacant depth like throwing stones down a deep, empty well. An absence of feeling too vast to see the bottom, haunting him like a persistent low grade fever day and night for an indeterminate time that passed like time does in a dream.

And then there was a girl.

An unlikely girl, maybe. Her unlikelihood making her all the more perfect in the end, just a girl smiling sweet but uncertain, offering her own lonely smile and a warm hand to join with his. A girl so human, so marvelously ordinary and extraordinary all at once. She'd made him feel things he'd thought lost at the bottom of that deep vacancy of sentiment, like he was coming up for air.

(_Is that what you're going to do to me?_)

It was true that maybe he'd been in love before, but it wasn't the same as this: like looking into the sun, blinding and burning, leaving an impression—a kind of scar—even in the following darkness. He'd never managed to tell her that. Now he never will.

Because the universe takes and takes, collecting on a debt he'd had no choice but to sign his name to.

It had taken her as he'd dreaded but known it would. Just another coin in payment toward that equilibrium he was increasingly certain he'd never reach. And if he'd thought it hurt the first time he'd lost her, he was fully unprepared for the lancing agony that was giving her away. He'd had to betray his own aching heart as a version of _himself_ got everything he'd ever wanted; and he'd had the detestable fortune to be the one that had to turn away. Turn his back and close the door behind him on a sealing dimensional wall, without glancing back. Without even a goodbye.

The truth is, a man can be orphaned again and again. And what he'd thought was that this would hurt less and less until he could feel nothing at all. It was just that same lie all people tell themselves. The sweet lies that are better than reality. The damage we cannot undo, so we turn our heads away and swear it will hurt less some day.

_(No. Not to you._)

And there was nothing he could do. Nothing then, nothing now. A Time Lord defeated, the universe laughing at him long and loud, the fool who runs himself ragged to achieve things that would happen with or without his hand. Because for every day that everybody lived, there was a thousand more where they didn't, and a few where nobody did at all.

Except him. Always except him. He just makes it happen.

As though being a Time Lord meant nothing. A civilization extinct, their long upheld virtues and ideals, mores, taboos, laws governing his life like fixed stars long after their very civilization had ceased to exist even in memory. He carried it all with him, because there was no one else who remembered the burnt orange glow of the transduction barrier, the glittery daze of afternoon sunlight bright on silvery treetops, splitting light into spectrum along the crimson-mossed alluvial plains outside Prydon, the bristle-skinned piedmonts that rippled along the eastern horizon.

The shining world of the seven systems, the shadows on the moons in the rusty night, the grass-smell of the morning breeze. The names of the cities, canyons, oceans: all dreams now that are as good as made up. Historical battles, generals, scientists. A billion years lost.

Because if something isn't remembered, it may as well have never existed at all.

Behind him, there is an explosion. It's not Action 5, not the nuclear blast he knows will make this place a crater, it's less than that, the passenger rocket self-destructing, making hopeless their plans to escape. The percussion wave knocks him to the rusty ground, the red dust around his faceplate, and he's staring down the reflection of his own face in the dark glass. The Base is collapsing dome by dome, burning from within, and inside are those terrified pioneers of their time, whoever is left alive he can only estimate by the voices he recognizes over the open comm line. Senior Technician Steffi Ehrlich, Nurse Yuri Kerenski, Geologist Mia Bennett, Captain Adelaide Brooke; they went out into the darkness of space without guarantee of safety or return, for the advancement of their species. For the prosperity of human kind.

He can still hear their voices. And it would be so easy to turn it off, but he doesn't.

(Her granddaughter has the same name as his. He wants to think his reasons for lingering are more complicated than that. Maybe they're not.)

They've done all this without knowing the vastness of space, the width of eternity. Without seeing the dwindling light at the end of all things and the white hot womb of creation, the vast silent darkness of the nothingness between galactic arms. Without knowing the silence and emptiness of a thousand years of breathing and thinking. Of living on while everything else comes to dust, until everything else is gone: the stars, the galaxies, the planets and skies and oceans. Until everything is gone except darkness and the Doctor.

The Doctor: the combined effort of every victory and defeat; a less-than-masterpiece of triumph and failure.

They'd done it because humanity ever endures in spite of their limited lives, indeed, because of them; their time is sweet because it will run out. They endeavor for greatness, for years they would never see. A monument to hope. To patience. To the transcendence of mortality.

It's a kind of cruel irony, almost beautiful for all its sharp edges the same way a deadly predator is breathtaking in the moment of its fluid, efficient kill: on Gallifrey, time had been an idea of which there was such a perceived surplus that its worth was almost nothing at all.

But even there, for those self-made gods in cages of flesh, one day it had run out.

He can scarcely remember a time he'd harbored such allegiance to his own race as these humans he's had to leave behind in the burning wreckage. He'd only missed his people, admired them, mourned them, honored them in retrospect. The way the human race will only mourn these people when looking back, never forgetting but never _remembering_ them either, people who were—_are_—more than their names and ranks. They'll honor them in cold principle, having taken their sacrifice, their exemplary devotion and altruism utterly for granted while they were alive and giving their all for every breathing human clinging to the skin of that glowing blue Earth.

But the hot beating heart of life, of thoughts and regrets and secrets, things forgotten and words unsaid: they mean more than the words of an epitaph, the cold hard lines of an effigy. A monument to the ever-swelling, conceited fear that throbs in the minds of thinking things: that if you aren't remembered, you never existed. And he's had enough.

He's had enough of having to remember. He's had enough of being forgotten.

And maybe it's long past time for him to do some forgetting of his own. Because _he_ is still drawing breath, taking steps, waking up to do the same deeds and endure the same tragedies day after day without end like some kind of punishment in an undistinguished circle of Dante's hell, somewhere between pride and the traitors, way down at the bottom.

Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill; the rerun of the rest of his life.

Looking over the landscape, red rocks and chemical fire, bright and strange in the lack of oxygen, the geometrical spider-shape of the base is silhouetted against the ember glow of its burning interior. The pockmarked face of Phobos is cresting the craggy horizon and it's the beginning of the end.

Someone had once told him that if he were to choose who lives and who dies, that would make him a monster. This at the end of a catastrophe in which everyone who deserved to live, all perished but one. And the other survivor was not a man who deserved to live while others had given their lives.

In the end, it was the averted holocaust that soothed that wound. Billions left alive in exchange for a few thousand.

At the time, he'd reminded himself: his capacity for life-saving was limited. He hadn't understood then what he understands now. Someone else had once said that if God did not exist, it would necessary to invent him.

(_I create myself._)

This is his new forever; his life after death, rising from the ashes of a million burned systems and lives lost and rewritten and never lived at all. There are no words to describe what he's seen. Words and stories are the tools of men, and this is a do-it-yourself kind of divinity.

(_I scatter the words in time and space…_)

He's allowed too much, been victimized and crippled by the laws of time that only exist in his own mind, bloodless edicts of a society of the dead that are just cold monuments to remembrance, and a implicit debt that will never lift for their loss.

The truth is that no life is worth more than another, and he's done glossing over the exchange rate. He won't make the distinction, and he won't let anything else make it for him. Laws of time, fixed points, mandates of suffering. He won't be that kind of God.

Because Susie Brooke deserves to meet her grandmother. She deserves to know her greatness face to face. She deserves to hear I love you from the mouth of the woman who inspires her to tread the stars.

An entitlement he'd denied another. He won't do it again.

To make up for worlds gone, cities burned, the dead unmourned, a debt unpaid, for days unseen and wrongs unpunished, great victories forgotten, for words never said: he turns back.

(_A message to lead myself here._)


End file.
